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Triathlon 2.0: Measuring marathon training

Yesterday I finished reading Triathlon 2.0. I really liked the book and learned a lot from it. As everything, related to triathlon, more than a half of the book is dedicated to cycling, but it does include valuable information for marathon running. The most important things I learned so far:

I didn’t realize you could use the absolute values in the Performance Management Chart in Training Peaks, not just relative ones. It it too late for the current training cycle, but I’m going to plan my next one accordingly.

You can measure your aerobic base separately from muscular endurance using Pa:HR decline and see if you are already have enough of long slow runs.

You can also measure the muscular endurance easier and more often than during a lactate threshold test. PA30, peak pace for 30 min (or any other time period) is available for every run. Surprisingly there is no TrainingPeaks graph to show your PA30 over time. On one hand it will be different for different workout types: long run, tempo-run or intervals. On the other hand, probably this functionality is left for WKO+, which costs $200 more. I’m not ready to go there just yet.

You can measure your taper. As you reduce volume, your fatigue (ATL) decreases, your form (TSB) increases, but your overall fitness (CTL) starts to decrease slowly as well. These measurements are not saying how much taper you should have before the race. There is a general recommendation of CTL not going down more than 10%. But you’ll have to experiment yourself and find out which type of taper leads to a better race. TrainingPeaks just allows you to measure it.